- This topic has 4 replies, 3 voices, and was last updated 15 years, 6 months ago by
.
-
Posts
-
So often you hear PC players wail on console-style multiplayer due to the “host advantage” and that’s never really been explained or demonstrated. Until now. The link below contains a video that not only explains it but also shows you just how much it can affect gameplay and discusses how to take advantage of it during competitive play.
http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/01/17/video-shows-shocking-call-of-duty-black-ops-host-advantage/
And a simple ‘ping’ doesn’t indicate how much lag there is between when you fire and when shots appear in the game environment.
When a host fires, his bullets are immediate injected into the game environment and immediately take effect whereas when a client fires his game has to process the bullets and send the network data to windows which shapes it into networking data that can be transmitted which is then shaped it into a packet which is then shaped into a frame which then has to wait for its turn on the local medium (switch, router, etc) which then has to send the frame through 15-25 hops, with each hop analyzing the frame, verifying the CRC, looking up the next hop in a database, and then transmitting it. When it finally reaches your local network (switch, router, etc) it has to wait for the local medium to be free (on university networking with many ppl this can be a problem). When the frame is received it has to have its CRC verified and the packet extracted, the packet has to have its CRC verified and the network data extracted, windows has to pass the data to the game which then has to process it as game data from another user and then your bullets get injected into the game world.
As you can see, there’s ALOT going on and despite how fast it actually happens (newer cisco routers can process 2 million packets/sec) the sheer number of steps does add up. There’s also a million other things that could be done to your game data during transit, such as queuing, labeling, and traffic policing, but that’s getting a little technical for general discussion.
Dedicated servers don’t solve any of that, they simply put everyone on an equal playing field. That’s as fair as a match can get.
thats why online gaming will always be *edited* unless everybody has a 100 Mbps connection, which is equivalent to all Ethernet cards in consoles and most in PC’s
Faster connection speeds do not guarantee better pings. Any student living on campus last semester can attest to that lol
The problem with lag is that no matter how fast your connection is, you’re still sending it across a network that was designed back in the 80s, using fiber that was laid in the 90s, and is still slaved to an antiquated table lookup system. It’s lightyears better than what we had in the 80s but it’s still a little on the dated side. Now granted, the internet is fast and getting faster every day but at the core almost all of our high-speed fiber protocols were written around concept of carrying voice traffic, hell to calculate the speed of an OC-N you take the 64kbps of a voice call and multiply by N*810 calls. All ISPs are doing at this point is laying more and more of the same fiber and aside from distance improvements we haven’t really seen any changes in the last 25 years. We’re only now starting to see protocols, such as jumbo framing, specifically designed to carry large quantaties of data. Until the internet backend takes a giant leap forward you won’t see anything major in terms of bandwidth increases or lag/latency reduction. When you take into account ill-advised “upgrades” like IPv6, you can definately count on the internet not getting any better.
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.